We’re drifting into high summer, the weather is mostly pleasant even when it’s rainy, and one’s fancy turns to going walkabout in this astonishingly diverse province we inhabit.

Well, we wage-slaves can’t always just follow our itchy feet whenever the road calls, so, here are a few treks of imagination through B.C.’s landscape.

All three of these literary perambulations centre on the mighty Fraser River, which has been called the soul of the province. So it should. More than 60 per cent of British Columbians live within its drainage basin, and they contribute about 10 per cent of Canada’s GDP.

The watershed of the Fraser and its tributaries covers more territory than Britain. During its nearly 1,400-kilometre journey to the sea, the river passes through mountains, boreal forests, rainforests, grasslands, deserts, and some of the emptiest and most intensely manufactured of landscapes.

The great river is the province’s highway of history and prehistory. Gold from its creeks and sandbars shaped the future we now inhabit. It’s a biological wonder, home to the continent’s biggest freshwater fish, the white sturgeon, and remains the world’s greatest nursery for wild salmon.

In 1995, then-environmental activist and now-Member of Parliament Fin Donnelly, a long-distance aquanaut with 14 marathons under his belt, set out to swim the Fraser from Tête Jaune Cache in the Rocky Mountains to tidewater. Then he repeated the feat in 2000.

Scholar of children’s literature and bilingual librarian Helen O’Brian, who founded the Vancouver Storytelling Festival in 1991 before moving to the Gulf Islands to raise specialty goats on an organic farm, travelled part of the wild Fraser between Soda Creek and Big Bar and got some idea of the magnitude of Donnelly’s feat.

So she set out to write a book documenting it — but as imagination-grabbing story for the next generation, not discursive history.

Fin’s Swim, 21 Days on the Fraser River, beautifully illustrated by Debbie Bowles, is a lovely little book that makes a perfect introduction to the marvels of the province for young readers.

It is lyrical but accessible in a down-to-earth way. It connects the contemporary hero to mythic figures. Explorers Alexander Mackenzie and Simon Fraser, the first person known to have travelled down almost the whole river — although some long-forgotten First Nations explorer might have done so before him — are part of the narrative.

And the book moves back and forth from Donnelly’s experience to brief and dramatic excerpts from Fraser’s journals recounting the experience 187 years earlier. The attention-grabbing asides range from an anecdote about the alleged capture of an apelike creature near Yale in 1882 to the jumbo jets thundering in and out of Vancouver’s airport, an idea that might have seemed just as outlandish a century ago as the sasquatch now seems to us.

If O’Brian’s epiphany occurred on the mid-Fraser where the river passes through spectacular pastorals of arid grasslands, flower-fed bighorn sheep, hoodoos, sage brush, fearsome canyons and stunning mountain vistas, that is precisely where the other two books are set.

Mack Bryson’s memoir A Cowboy’s Life: Memories of a Western Cowboy in an Empire of Grass documents a way of life that is at the core of British Columbia’s modern history but is alien to most of us, ensconced as we are in our cityscapes of glass, steel and concrete.

His great-grandfather, having crossed the continent by covered wagon on the Oregon Trail, was lured north by the discovery of vast gold deposits on the Fraser. But he was one of those men astute enough to see more gold in the bunch grass west of the river above Lillooet than in hit-or-miss placer claims.

And so was launched a family journey to what would culminate in the third-largest ranch in B.C. and the genesis of what is now the Churn Creek protected area.

Family histories risk inflicting the tedium of domestic minutiae and clan politics upon the uninterested, but this one is really a remarkable and fascinating excursion through the province’s development, as witnessed through the prism of one of its most historic families.

The American mythmaking machine has largely pre-empted the romance of the Old West, but it was present in Yale and Lillooet and Lytton as much as it ever was in Tombstone or Dodge City. And it persisted longer. Some of it is still there.

A Cowboy’s Life is replete with lively anecdotes about hay farms in what is now metropolitan Vancouver, stage coach stops on the Cariboo Wagon Road, steamboats landing at Yale, the legendary freight packer Catiline, an angry bride telling her cowboy groom that either the whiskey leaves the wedding dinner or she does, and watches while he smashes the bottles, preferring a feisty wife to boisterous cowhands. And then there is that same cowboy, bagging supper by shooting the heads off grouse with his pistol.

There are cattle drives, cantankerous bulls, treks into the Yalakom and the Gun Creek Mountains and all the way back to the same distant, snow-capped peaks sighted by Simon Fraser in 1808. There are beloved dogs, beloved rifles, beloved horses and beloved women. There are blizzards, washouts and a hair-raising near-drowning in the French Bar rapids. It is, shall we say, the very stuff of a vanishing and, in some cases, already vanished B.C.

Bernie Fandrich’s book, The Majestic Thompson River, is both a history of the Fraser River’s biggest tributary and a guidebook by one of the founders of Canada’s world-famous whitewater rafting industry.

Anyone who has looked down from Lytton at the plume of clear, green water from the Thompson eddying into the great, muddy torrent of the Fraser and its annual burden of 20 million tonnes of silt, recognizes instantly how different the rivers are.

Fandrich begins his richly illustrated book with a brief overview of Hudson’s Bay Company Governor George Simpson’s first descent of the river by water in 1828, a voyage that didn’t occur until two decades after Simon Fraser’s epic descent of the river that David Thompson named after him. In ironic turnabout, Fraser had named the Thompson after his colleague in fur trade exploration.

The real meat of The Majestic Thompson is its strip map approach.

The kilometre-by-kilometre narrative begins near the outflow from Kamloops Lake and then follows the river, landmark-by-landmark, to its confluence with the Fraser. And it provides GPS co-ordinates so you can be sure you are where you think you are if you take the book on a real expedition.

But this is far more than an itemized guidebook.

It offers chapters on the plant ecology of the river as it cuts through the arid rain shadow of the Interior; on its geology and morphology; on historic towns like Walhachin, Spence’s Bridge, Ashcroft and Lytton.

Here you will read about the discoveries of gold and of trophy steelhead trout; about Chinese railway labourers and the silk trains they made possible — single-cargo express locomotives speeding the prized fabric from Vancouver docks to eastern garment makers.

There is a bizarre and ill-fated scheme to use camels in the desert, and frontier characters like Chief Nicolas (the misnamed “Hanging Judge”) Begbie, and Scottish adventurer James Teit who “went native” and became one of the most important recorders of First Nations ethnographic history.

So there you have it, three splendid additions to the armchair adventurer’s B.C. bookshelf.

Fin’s Swim can be had from Hatake Press, 622 Gallagher Bay Road, Mayne Island, B.C., V0N 2J2, ISBN 978-0-9881042 and online at finsswim.ca/book; A Cowboy’s Life is available as both a paperback ISBN 978-1-77097-435-7 and as an ebook ISBN 978-1-77097-436-4 through Victoria’s Friesen Press at www.friesenpress.com/bookstore; British Columbia’s Majestic Thompson River can be obtained from Nicomen House Publishing, PO Box 30, Lytton, B.C., V0K 1Z0, ISBN 978-0-9917345-0-4 and by email from majestic@kumsheen.com/" TARGET="_blank">majestic@kumsheen.com

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